Here be pirates

So, picture it: we’re on the way out to dinner. Despite having known all day that we’d be doing this, I have, of course, left it to the last minute to get ready, and now we’re running late.

As I hurry across the office floor, however, I’m suddenly brought up short. My leg feels strange: kinda heavy, and awkward, as if there’s some kind of dead weight attached to it. And, indeed, there IS a dead weight attached to it (well, OK, a medium weight…), for, glancing down, what do I see, but Rubin’s bed. Attached to my leg. Yes.

Somehow the zipper on the cover of the bed had managed to entangle itself so firmly in the mesh of my fishnet tights that it was now well and truly stuck. This had happened in the split second in which I brushed past it on the way out of the door. Honestly, I couldn’t make this stuff up.

Well, I leaned down and tried to untangle it. Couldn’t. The zipper hadn’t just snagged on the tights you see: it had wrapped itself around them, like they were its long-lost lover and it never wanted to let them go. Ever. I couldn’t have done it if I’d tried. Because of the angle I was standing at, I couldn’t really get a clear go at the situation without removing the tights, and, well, pretty  darn lazy over here, (Also: LATE) so rather than taking them off, I decided to simply call for help.

“Terry!” I shouted “I’m attached to Rubin’s bed!”

There was a long pause from the direction of the bedroom, where Terry was doing whatever it is men do when they’re getting ready to go out somewhere. (What IS IT that men do, by the way? Seriously, WHAT?)

“I’m attached to it too, Amber,” he called back resignedly. “It used to belong to me, remember?”

(This is actually true: it used to be his. Not his BED, you understand. That would just be weird. No, Rubin currently sleeps on a giant beanbag which used to belong to Terry. It lived in the corner of the living room, tucked behind the couch, from where Terry would take it and dump it in front of the TV when he wanted to play X-Box. God, he LOVED that beanbag. Then Rubin set his sights on it. We noticed that any time we were downstairs, Rubin would wriggle his way behind the couch to get to the beanbag. He had two other beds (well, three if you count ours. And he does.) at his disposal at the time, but he would sit and WEEP to get into those beans. It was pretty obvious what was going to happen there. Terry is no match for a redhead and a wolf, obviously, so the beanbag was grudgingly handed over, in a small ceremony which Rubin celebrated by throwing up on said beanbag at the first possible opportunity. I don’t think Terry’s ever really gotten over it.)

Miraculously, the tights managed to survive their ordeal unscathed (This is one of the reasons I like fishnets rather than sheer tights – they’re surprisingly hard-wearing. And when they do get a hole or something, you can normally cobble it back together as if it never happened.) (I get them from Accessorize, by the way. I’m not 100% sure if the ones I’ve linked to are the ones I buy, because I’ve only ever picked them up in-store, and never as a two-pack, but people keep asking me about them, so let the record show that Accessorize is the source of the nude fishnet tights. Also some really great bags and scarves.), and we were soon on our way. Our adventures were not over, though, because we were on our way to – what else? – a PIRATE restaurant. Yes, you heard me. At last the title of this post makes sense! Only not really!

(That thing about Rubin’s bed? That was actually supposed to be an aside. This post WAS going to just be about the pirate restaurant, but then that whole incident went down, and it’s not everybody who can say they once had a dog’s bed attached to their leg, is it? I can, though. Go me!)

So! Pirates! Arrrr!

The restaurant was actually an Italian. Which makes total sense now, because I don’t know about you, but I just can’t think about pasta without also thinking about pirates, you know? Terry had bought us a Groupon for it a few weeks ago, but we hadn’t gotten around to using it yet. In the meantime, though, our friends Danny and Caroline had gone to the same restaurant. And reported back that it was pirate themed. “Arrr!” they said (OK, not really.), “It be full of skeletons and bottles o’ rum, me hearties!”

“Yeah, right,” said Terry and I. “AS IF we’re falling for that! This isn’t Disney, you know: there are no pirate restaurants here!”

(“Damn, but the service in here must be SLOW,” I said as we walked in.)

(I didn’t really: I only thought of that joke later. Just imagine I said it at the time…)

Famous last words, eh?

To be fair, it’s not so much pirate themed as it is Robert Louis Stevenson themed. See, it’s called the Hispaniola (“It’s a Spanish Italian pirate restaurant?” I said in confusion, when Terry told me this), and the “theme” is based around Treasure Island. (Apparently it once used to be a bar, just like every other building in Edinburgh once used to be a bar. And apparently Robert Louis Stevenson used to drink there. Just like every other building in … I’ll stop now.) Also, only one section has skeletons standing around your table: we ate in the OTHER section, which had no skeletons. Or pirates. Or pirate skeletons. It DID have lots of pasta and wine, though, so a good time was had by all. Well, by me and Terry, anyway. I’d like to assume the skeletons also had a good time, but that’s the problem with skeletons, isn’t it? You just never know what they’re thinking…